# Broughty Castle

castle and museum in Dundee City, Scotland, United Kingdom

Dundee City, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1490 CE

## Story

• Broughty Castle stands on a rock at the mouth of the River Tay in Broughty Ferry, where a ferry and a fishing harbour were already old when the earls of Angus held the crag.
• A royal licence let George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, fortify the rock in the mid-fifteenth century, and in 1490 James IV granted it to Andrew, 2nd Lord Gray, to raise a castle.
• After Pinkie in 1547 the English held the castle until Paul de Thermes led a French and Scottish assault that recovered it in February 1550.
• The Gray family sold the castle in the 1660s, and after a long ruin the War Office rebuilt it in 1860 and 1861 as a coast battery designed by Robert Rowand Anderson.
• A museum opened in the tower in 1969, and excavation on the green has found a possible sixteenth-century wall and the primer pits used to arm mines.

## Visiting

Admission to the museum and the grounds is free. From April to 25 October the castle is closed on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday it opens from 10:00 and closes at 16:00. On Sunday it opens from 12:30 and closes at 16:00.
Last entry is 15 minutes before closing time. From 26 October to March the castle closes for the winter. Dogs are not allowed to enter the grounds or the building, except guide dogs.

## History

Broughty Castle stands on a rocky promontory at the mouth of the River Tay, in Broughty Ferry. The rock was called the Crag, and the harbour beside it was Portincraig, where an earl of Angus founded a ferry hospice around 1180. The crag later counted as a symbolic seat of the earldom of Angus.

George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, received a licence on 20 January to wall and ditch a castle on the crag. Writers date that writ to 1454, and the medieval year, which turned on 25 March, places it in 1455. By 1466 the place was already called a fortress. His son Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus, lost it to the crown in 1490.

James IV granted the rock to Andrew, 2nd Lord Gray, with power to raise a castle of gates, yetts, and drawbridges. A datestone of 1496 was later remembered on the tower, completion is also put around 1495, and a paper of 1514 speaks of a new fortress whose keeper was Thomas Gray. The tower was an artillery house from the start, with inverted keyhole gunloops, set in a courtyard that once carried round corner towers.

In September 1547, after Pinkie, Patrick, Lord Gray, gave the castle to the English. One account says no shot was fired, and another that he was paid one thousand pounds sterling. Andrew Dudley commanded the first garrison, and John Luttrell held it from 1548. On 6 February 1550 Paul de Thermes led the French assault, and the garrison surrendered within the next few days.

The Lords Gray made Broughty a chief house in the early seventeenth century. On 31 August 1651 the garrison fled George Monck’s army, leaving four cannons and nineteen barrels of salmon. Patrick, eighth Lord Gray, sold the castle in 1666, and it declined into a ruin that Robert Burns saw in 1787.

Railways bought the shell in 1846 and 1850. The War Office acquired it in 1854 or 1855, and in 1860 and 1861 Robert Rowand Anderson rebuilt it as a coast battery for a sergeant and fourteen men. Later guns, a submarine-mining station, and two world wars kept the fort in service into the middle of the twentieth century.

A museum opened in the tower in 1969, and the state took ownership in 1973. Watching briefs and a dig in 2009 found a possible sixteenth-century wall and the brick primer pits on the green. In March 2026 funding to keep the museum open for three years was put both at one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, shared by Dundee City Council and the Northwood Charitable Trust, and at one hundred thousand pounds from the council over two financial years.

## Photographs

- [View of Broughty Castle in Dundee. — TimVickers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Broughty_Castle_%282%29.JPG)
- [A cold March evening over Broughty Castle — Mark Wrycraft](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/A_cold_March_evening_over_Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_734878.jpg)
- [Boundary Stone, Broughty Castle The stone is inscribed with W D and an arrow. Under is "No 3". In the distance is Dundee and the Tay bridges. — Bob Embleton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Boundary_Stone%2C_Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1057053.jpg)
- [Broughty Castle A 15th century construction after changing hands over the years. It was acquired in 1855 by the War Office to protect the harbour from the — Bob Embleton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1061603.jpg)
- [Broughty Castle Built in 1496 on a rocky promontory,Broughty Castle has faced many sieges and battles, it is now a very good museum — Paul McIlroy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1101415.jpg)
- [Broughty Castle Originally built in the 1400s, Broughty castle is now a museum operated by Dundee Council. The castle sits at the mouth of the harbour. — Karen Vernon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1253339.jpg)
- [Broughty Castle — Graham Hogg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Broughty_Castle_%28geograph_5965090%29.jpg)
- [View of Broughty Castle in Dundee. — TimVickers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Broughty_Castle_%282%29_%28contrast_and_colour_balance%29.jpg)
- [View of Broughty Castle in Dundee. — TimVickers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Broughty_Castle_%282%29_%28retouch_filter_NR%29.jpg)
- [Broughty Castle — James Denham](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1896966.jpg)

## Sources

- [Broughty Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broughty_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Andrew Dudley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Dudley) — Wikipedia
- [Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Campbell,_4th_Earl_of_Argyll) — Wikipedia
- [Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Douglas,_5th_Earl_of_Angus) — Wikipedia
- [George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Douglas,_4th_Earl_of_Angus) — Wikipedia
- [Henri Cleutin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cleutin) — Wikipedia
- [James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hamilton,_2nd_Earl_of_Arran) — Wikipedia
- [John Luttrell (soldier)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Luttrell_(soldier)) — Wikipedia
- [Paul de Thermes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Thermes) — Wikipedia
- [History and stories: Broughty Castle](https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit/all/broughty-castle/history-and-stories/) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Broughty Castle Statement of Significance](https://app-hes-pubs-prod-neu-01.azurewebsites.net/api/file/8efce139-303d-49bf-a1af-b0ca00f35d92) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Broughty Castle Museum](https://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/culture/broughty-castle) — Leisure and Culture Dundee
- [Significant Investment Secures Future for Broughty Castle Museum](https://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/news/significant-investment-secures-future-broughty-castle-museum) — Leisure and Culture Dundee
- [Future of Broughty Castle secured](https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/5448692/broughty-castle-future-what-happens-next/) — The Courier
- [Dundee, Broughty Ferry, Broughty Castle](https://www.trove.scot/place/33391) — Trove
- [HSCO-90043-2009-01 Broughty Castle](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/data-catalogue/resource/49cd3d184730a24d6473dcd033a2a41c7441fd626918b84f830b3ab348926c8c) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Mysterious Hole In Broughty Green To Be Investigated](https://www.buildscotland.co.uk/construction-news/88740/mysterious-hole-in-broughty-green-to-be-investigated) — Scottish Construction News
- [Broughty Castle (2).JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_(2).JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A cold March evening over Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 734878.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_cold_March_evening_over_Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_734878.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Boundary Stone, Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1057053.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boundary_Stone,_Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1057053.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1061603.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1061603.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1101415.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1101415.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1253339.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1253339.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle (geograph 5965090).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_(geograph_5965090).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle (2) (contrast and colour balance).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_(2)_(contrast_and_colour_balance).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle (2) (retouch filter NR).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_(2)_(retouch_filter_NR).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Broughty Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1896966.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broughty_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1896966.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Broughty Castle stands on a rocky promontory at the mouth of the River Tay, in Broughty Ferry on the eastern side of Dundee. The rock was known early as the Crag. The harbour beside it was called Portincraig, a name read as the port at the crag, and a later suggestion that the place was Partencraig, or crab rock, is a modern reinterpretation of that older harbour name. The name Broughty itself has been read as a strong point on the Tay, which leaves open the possibility of a fort here in the Iron Age or the early historic period, though what, if anything, stood on the rock before the fifteenth century is not known.

Around 1180 an Earl of Angus granted land at Portincraig to Arbroath Abbey so that a hospice could be built for travellers using the ferry across the Tay to Fife, together with fishing rights from the Crag westwards. His son Earl Gilchrist confirmed the grant in 1199 or 1200. The earls drew tolls from the ferry and profits from the fishing, and the crag seems to have carried a symbolic weight beyond the income. Between 1371 and 1406 Margaret Stewart, Countess of Angus, had a royal grant of the Crag and the fishing of Broughty, and of the lands of Ethiebeaton. The grant is known from a later reference, and it has been tied to her success in having her illegitimate son George Douglas recognised as her heir. She appears to have kept Broughty Crag when, in 1389, she passed the bulk of the earldom to that son, rather than acquiring the rock as something new. Between 1424 and 1437 Wishart of Pittarrow is said to have controlled the crag, or at least the fishing, until King James I forfeited him for treason and the property passed to the Earl of Angus.

George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, was the man who received a royal licence to fortify the rock. Born about 1427, he was the son of William Douglas, 2nd Earl of Angus, and Margaret Hay of Yester, and he was later called the Great Earl. He succeeded in 1446 on the death of his childless brother James Douglas, 3rd Earl of Angus, and he became the first Red chief of Douglas. The Black Douglases, earls of Douglas, and the Red Douglases of Angus both descended through illegitimate lines from William the Hardy, Lord of Douglas. The Black line came through Archibald the Grim. The grandfather of George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, was an illegitimate son of William, 1st Earl of Douglas. Both houses bore the three silver stars and the red heart, and the fourth earl and the eighth Earl of Douglas were third cousins. Angus, though, stood closer to the Stewarts. Through his grandmother, Princess Mary of Scotland, he was a great-grandson of Robert III.

In June 1448 George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, rode with the Earl of Douglas and Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormonde, on a punitive raid into England that reached Alnwick and burned it. The raid answered attacks in which the Earl of Northumberland and Robert Ogle had burned Dunbar, and the Earl of Salisbury had wasted Dumfries. In July the Douglases invested Warkworth and defeated Northumberland at the Battle of Sark. That partnership was the last time the two branches rode together against the Percys and the Nevilles. In 1449 Angus was made Warden of the Middle Marches. In 1452 King James II killed the eighth Earl of Douglas at Stirling while the earl was there under a safe-conduct. Douglasdale rose under the dead earl’s brothers: James, the new ninth earl, his twin Archibald Douglas, Earl of Moray, Hugh Douglas, Earl of Ormonde, and John Douglas, Lord of Balvenie. When the rebellion became open war in 1455, George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, took the king’s side. Kinship pulled him that way. He and James II were first cousins within one degree, and the Red and Black houses had long been tense. He was given high command in the royal army, and he may have been with the king at the siege of Abercorn. After James Hamilton, 1st Lord Hamilton, defected, the ninth earl fled toward England and Henry VI. The brothers who stayed were met by Angus and the border clans near Langholm on 18 May. The Battle of Arkinholm was a rout. Moray was killed and Ormonde was captured.

The licence for Broughty belongs to this same earl, and the year is counted in two ways. King James II gave George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, permission to build a castle or fortress on Broughty Crag, to surround it with walls and ditches, to close it with iron gates, to raise it in height, and to finish whatever belonged to a castle. The writ was issued on 20 January. Later writers often date it 1454. Under the medieval habit of not changing the year until 25 March, that January falls in 1455. The same document calls Broughty Crag the capital messuage of the earldom of Angus, its formal seat of government. That is a curious claim. The earls kept little here beyond the fishing and the ferry. The heart of their titled lordship lay around Kirriemuir, and their great castle was Tantallon in Lothian. The status was unlikely to have been invented for the writ. A licence of this kind was sometimes used to recognise a castle that already existed, so it is not certain that 1455 was the first building. In 1466 the Earl of Crawford gained control of the fortress of Broughty from King James III, which shows that the site was already fortified. George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, died on 12 March 1463. His son Archibald was still a minor when he succeeded, in 1462 or 1463.

Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus, was likely born around 1449. His mother was Isabella Sibbald, daughter of the master of the household of James II. During his childhood his father had backed James II against the Black Douglases, and he had been at the siege of Roxburgh in 1460, where the king was killed by a bursting cannon. Tradition says that George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, set the crown on the child king’s head and asked who would dare to move it. The fifth earl grew into one of the most powerful men on the Scottish Marches, and into a noble willing to rebel under both James III and James IV. In 1481 James III made him Warden of the East March. The next year, during an English invasion, he joined the nobles who seized the king at Lauder. Later chronicle, including David Hume of Godscroft, credits him with moving against the royal favourite Thomas or Robert Cochrane, and ties the episode to the nickname Bell the Cat. The more dramatic details, including the hanging of the favourites from Lauder Bridge, are not securely attested. The nickname itself comes from the fable of the mice who needed someone to bell the cat. Angus then joined Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany, the king’s disaffected younger brother, who was part of the English invasion. Under the Treaty of Fotheringhay in June 1482, Albany promised to recognise Edward IV as overlord, to do homage, to abandon the French alliance, and to surrender named border lands if English help put him on the Scottish throne. During James III’s captivity Albany briefly became lieutenant-general, and in his dealings with Edward IV he had styled himself Alexander IV. By March 1483 Albany and Angus had submitted and been pardoned.

Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Angus, rebelled again in 1488, this time with the forces of the king’s son, James, Duke of Rothesay. James III was defeated at the Battle of Sauchieburn and killed as he fled. Angus was briefly a guardian of the young James IV, then lost influence to the Homes and the Hepburns. Alexander Home replaced him as Warden of the East March. In 1491 he secretly negotiated with Henry VII, promising to follow English counsel and to surrender Hermitage Castle, which commanded the pass through Liddesdale, in exchange for English estates. James IV forced him to submit. Hermitage and the Liddesdale lands were given up for the lordship of Bothwell. Restored to favour in 1493, he was chancellor until 1498. He took part in talks over the surrender of Perkin Warbeck in June 1497, fell from favour again, and was confined in Dumbarton Castle in 1501. He went with James IV’s army into England in 1513 but opposed giving battle at Flodden. When the king rejected that advice, Angus withdrew before the fighting. He died in October 1513. Before that fall he had already lost Broughty. In 1490 he was stripped of much of his power, and he was coerced into ceding the castle to the crown.

King James IV then transferred Broughty Crag to Andrew, 2nd Lord Gray of Fowlis, also written Foulis, who had just been made hereditary sheriff of Forfarshire. The grant gave him full power to make and raise a castle and fortress on the rock, with gatehouses, iron yetts, machicolation, drawbridges, and the other fortifications. His chief seat was Castle Huntly, and the family also had a substantial house at Fowlis Easter, so Broughty has often been treated as a coast defence rather than a second home. That reading may miss the symbolic pull of the crag. The pressure to fortify the Tay was immediate. In 1489 five heavily armed English vessels were captured off the Fife coast. In the year of the Gray grant, three more English warships were forced onto nearby sandbanks. One account says the five ships captured near the site in 1489 prompted James IV to order the castle’s construction in 1490. Another leaves the builder less certain. A datestone reading 1496 was later remembered at the north angle of the tower, below the battlement. Dates cut on Scottish castles are not always the year of building, and some were added long afterwards, so the stone is not decisive. A legal document of 1514 mentions the new fortress of Broughty and its principal keeper, Thomas Gray, which suggests a considerable rebuilding, though the underlying writ has not been located. One plausible reading is that George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, strengthened an existing residence, and that Lord Gray then built the tower around 1500. Completion is also placed around 1495. The castle’s job, wherever the first stone was laid, was to hold the entrance of the Tay and so to guard Dundee and Perth from English raiders. It was a military strongpoint, a lordly house, and a symbol of authority at once.

The medieval castle, so far as the fabric and the old views allow, was a rectangular tower at the north-west corner of a walled four-sided courtyard, with the entrance gate in the west curtain immediately beside the tower. A smaller round tower stood at the north-east corner. In 1856 the Royal Engineers found a gun in it. Some kind of tower or turret occupied the south-west corner. Both towers appear in early nineteenth-century paintings, including Alexander Smith’s view of about 1835, Beach Crescent and Broughty Castle. Writing around 1890 from memory of the castle before 1860, MacGibbon and Ross said that recognisable remains of three round towers stood on the curtain, and that the courtyard was completely buried in ruins under turf. Everything except the main tower, the entrance gate, and a stretch of the west curtain has gone. The tower was entered at ground level, apparently by two doorways, one on the east and one on the south. It had two vaulted rooms on the ground floor, three upper floors with wall chambers, and an attic. The ground floor has gun-holes, some of the inverted keyhole type dated to the middle and later fifteenth century, so the tower was meant to be defended with guns from the start. The battlements are a Victorian recreation, but the projecting roof corbels are largely original, and pictures made before the restoration show a cap-house rising at one corner and a corbelled parapet with small turrets at the other corners and at the middle of each wall, an outline close to nearby Affleck Castle. The medieval gate is round-arched and roll-moulded. The north-west angle and most of the west curtain survive, much repaired. The south end of the west curtain was buried in the earthwork of the rearmament of the 1890s. The north curtain, heavily rebuilt around a Victorian gateway, drawbridge, and gunloops, seems to follow the old wall line, and the round recessed mountings of the later gun emplacements echo the smaller north-east and south-west towers.

How the castle was armed in the English occupation of 1547 to 1550 is thinly documented. What survives on paper is a list of handguns and longbows, and notes of the garrison’s infantry and their food. In the 1860s the detachable breech chamber of a wrought-iron breech-loading cannon of sixteenth-century type was recovered from the north-east tower. Its calibre was 1.8 inches, or 42 millimetres, which matches the smallest stone shot associated with the Scottish artillery defences of about 1450 at Threave, and also the swivel guns called bases used in the Tudor navy, examples of which have been raised from the Mary Rose. The chamber is now in the National Museum of Scotland. Other ordnance said to have been found in the later 1850s has since been lost. Three stone cannonballs found at the castle are displayed in the castle museum. In 1572 Regent Mar expected to draw two battering pieces from Broughty for his siege of Edinburgh, the same number he expected from Dumbarton and from Stirling. In 1651 the castle was defended by four cannons. In both cases the guns were probably bronze or cast-iron pieces of medium or heavy calibre, which would make Broughty well armed by Scottish standards.

The castle’s most violent years belong to the war later called the Rough Wooing, and the politics of that war run through the minority of Mary, Queen of Scots. James V died on 14 December 1542. His heir was a daughter six days old. James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, stood next in line after her. He had been born about 1519 at Hamilton in Lanarkshire, the eldest legitimate son of James Hamilton, 1st Earl of Arran, and Janet Beaton, also written Bethune. His paternal grandmother Mary was the eldest daughter of King James II, and the Hamiltons descended from Walter FitzGilbert, who had received the barony of Cadzow from Robert the Bruce. He succeeded his father in 1529 while still a minor, as the ward of his illegitimate elder half-brother, James Hamilton of Finnart. On the death of John Stewart, Duke of Albany, in 1536, he was next after the king’s own descendants. In 1532 he married Margaret Douglas, about ten years his senior, a daughter of James Douglas, 3rd Earl of Morton, and of Catherine Stewart, a natural daughter of James IV. Finnart arranged the match and paid Morton 4,000 marks. Margaret was to have Kinneil House for life if her husband died first. They had five sons, James, Gavin, John, David, and Claud, and three daughters, Barbara, Jean, and Anne. In 1544 Arran tried to divorce his wife. She seems to have been in poor mental health, and two of the sons, James and Claud, later became insane.

James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, was chosen regent, or governor, after a meeting in Edinburgh on 3 January 1543. He consolidated his place by giving away the late king’s possessions to supporters and kinsmen. Supporters of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, challenged his claim by arguing that his father’s divorce and second marriage had been invalid. At first he was Protestant and pro-English. In 1543 he helped to negotiate a marriage between the infant Mary and Edward, son of Henry VIII. The same year he turned. He converted to Catholicism and backed a French policy. After Cardinal Beaton’s arrest on 20 January 1543, Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, retired to his own lands to raise a force against Arran. Argyll, Huntly, Moray, and Bothwell, with many barons and with bishops and abbots, assembled at Perth and vowed to resist the governor. Summoned to disperse, they did not fight. When it became known that Henry VIII had arranged the marriage treaty, Argyll, Huntly, Bothwell, and Lennox marched from Stirling with a force of ten thousand and compelled the governor to surrender the infant queen, whom they took back to Stirling.

Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, called the Red, was born about 1507 and died in 1558. He was the eldest son of Colin Campbell, 3rd Earl of Argyll, and Lady Jean Gordon, daughter of Alexander Gordon, 3rd Earl of Huntly. In October 1529, just after he succeeded, he was sent to quell a rising in the southern isles. The main chiefs submitted. Alexander MacDonald of Dunnyveg persuaded James V that the disturbances came chiefly because the earls of Argyll had used the lieutenancy of the isles for their own gain. Argyll was summoned to account for the duties and rental of the isles, imprisoned for a time, then freed but stripped of his offices, which were restored only after James V died. A charter of 28 April 1542 called him master of the king’s wine cellar. With Huntly and Moray he was named to the council in the document Beaton produced as the will of James V, a paper that also made Beaton governor and guardian of the infant Mary. In the summer of 1544 Lennox, who had gone over to Henry VIII, plundered the isle of Arran and took Bute and Rothesay Castle with eighteen ships and eight hundred men supplied by the English king. As Lennox sailed down the Clyde, Argyll, with four thousand men, held Dunoon Castle and fired on him. Lennox attacked Dunoon, burned the village and the church, and drove Argyll out at heavy loss. Lennox then wasted much of Kintyre. He did not regain Dumbarton Castle, and around 28 May 1544 he retreated to his ships and sailed for England. On Lennox’s forfeiture, Argyll received the largest share of the estates. Lennox went on stirring the isles, but the practical result was to increase Argyll’s power.

France already had a resident in Scotland. Henri Cleutin, seigneur d’Oisel and of Villeparisis, was born in 1515 and died on 20 June 1566. He was the representative of France in Scotland from 1546 to 1560, a gentleman of the chamber of the French king, and later a diplomat in Rome from 1564 to 1566, during the French wars of religion. His father Pierre Cleutin, or Clutin, was mayor of Paris, and both Pierre and Henri’s grandfather had been councillors of the French parlement. The family was traced by a later editor to a cloth merchant who supplied Charles VI. Pierre acquired Villeparisis and built a castle there, and Henri Cleutin was made its lord in 1552. He may have been intended for the church. In 1535 he was involved in a murder in Paris and fled. He had a pardon in 1538. On that incident his birth has been revised to 1515. He was usually known as Monsieur d’Oysel. He arrived during a pause in the English war that followed the Treaty of Ardres, though peace with the Holy Roman Empire was not fully closed. In December 1546 the imperial ambassador in London, François van der Delft, noticed him. The English privy council joked that Cleutin carried the letters of Bellerophon, the mythic figure sent to kill the chimera after murdering his brother. During the siege of Saint Andrews Castle he is said to have advised Regent Arran to promise the defenders what they asked and to behead them when they came out. Arran refused. Cleutin joked with Mary of Guise that the refusal was good-natured, and unlike any prince he knew.

Henri Cleutin was a follower of the house of Guise, which was gaining power in France. Scotland was ruled by James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, for Mary, but a large share of power and of the crown income sat with Mary of Guise, widow of James V. After the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Pinkie in September 1547, d’Oysel and Mary of Guise rode to Stirling. John Knox later wrote that Cleutin was as scared as a fox smoked in his hole. Cleutin and Walter Ogilvy took the news of the defeat to France. On 7 July 1548, when André de Montalembert, sieur d’Esse, spoke in the parliament at Haddington and proposed the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin, d’Oysel, as French ambassador, accepted the unanimous approval. One account makes James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, Duke of Châtellerault in 1548. His own life places the reward in 1549, from Henry II, for agreeing, reluctantly, to that French marriage. He later joined the Protestant Lords of the Congregation against the regency of Mary of Guise. His regency itself lasted from 1543 to 1554.

Pinkie was fought on 10 September 1547. Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, with four thousand west Highlanders, commanded the right wing of the Scottish army. The English regent was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, now Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of the boy king Edward VI. Somerset was pressing the marriage of Edward to Mary by force, the policy Henry VIII had set before his death on 28 January 1547. After the Scottish army was devastated, Somerset ordered the capture of Broughty. The owner, Patrick, 4th Lord Gray, supported the English cause. One account says he wanted Mary to marry a Protestant Englishman rather than a Catholic Frenchman, and that the castle was taken without a shot. Another says it was surrendered by purchase. Gray of Foulis was paid £1,000 sterling for the castle, a payment noted on 14 November 1547. A messenger from the castle, Rinyon Cockburn, also called Ninian, who spoke to Somerset before the castle was handed over, was given a reward of £4. The Scottish keeper, Henry Durham, received an English pension, income from the fishing, and a licence to import and export. Durham later lent the English commander £138.

The hold mattered because it stood at the mouth of the Tay in such a way that Dundee and Perth, then called Saint John’s Town, and many other towns, would become subject to it or would have to give up the use of the river. The swift current also made a naval bombardment of the old castle impractical. Soon after taking possession, the English cut a ditch across the landward side of the promontory. Edward Clinton began the refortification on the advice of an Italian engineer, Master John Rossetti, also called Giovanni di Rossetti and Master John, and left one hundred men guarded by three ships. William Bruce of Earlshall feared that the English would build an outpost on the south side of the Tay.

The first garrison commander was Andrew Dudley. He was born about 1507 and died in 1559, a younger brother of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. Their father was Edmund Dudley, a councillor of Henry VII, and their mother was Elizabeth Grey, daughter of Edward Grey, 4th Viscount Lisle. Edmund was executed by the young Henry VIII as a scapegoat for the old king’s financial policies, while Andrew was still a toddler. John pushed his brother forward. Andrew Dudley served in the household of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and as an exchequer officer in the 1540s. In October 1540, answering a complaint about the exchequer, Norfolk told the privy council that the only two people he had ever found jobs for were Andrew Dudley and Edward Belingeham. As brother of the lord high admiral, Dudley served at sea and commanded the new royal ship Swallow in 1545. In March 1546, as equerry of the stable, he carried Henry VIII’s gift of hackney horses, greyhounds, and running dogs to the Regent of Flanders.

On 27 February 1547 Andrew Dudley was appointed admiral of the fleet. He was to annoy the Scots in the North Sea, to interrupt munitions sailing from France to Scotland, and to show the fleet near Saint Andrews Castle to encourage the English allies besieged there. On 7 March, about thirty miles from Yarmouth, he met the Great Lion, one of the principal Scottish ships, in company with the Lyonesse, the Mary Gallante, and another ship. He gave the Lion a broadside from the Pauncey, properly the Pensée and sometimes called the Pansy. The French ambassador in London, Odet de Selve, had the details from Nicolas d’Arfeville, a French painter and cartographer. The Lion was overwhelmed. The others surrendered except the unnamed ship. At least one notable passenger was killed. While the Lion was being towed to Yarmouth she grounded on a sandbank and was lost. Prisoners were taken to the Tower. On 10 March the privy council commended Dudley for his hardy enterprise against the Scots, told him to lay up the Pauncey and the other ships for repair, and told him to release his Scottish prisoners except notables, gentlemen of estimation, and a further group of forty. Later that year he was sent to the Tay.

Andrew Dudley hoped to distribute Tyndale’s Bible in Dundee. In October 1547 he wrote that never had a man had so weak a company, given all to eating and drinking and slothfulness, though the house stood well. His garrison included Italian and Spanish soldiers, and he hoped Grey of Wilton would send him an expert French surgeon. On 27 October 1547 the town of Dundee agreed to support the garrison and to resist the governor of Scotland, James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran. The constable of Dundee, John Scrimgeour, and the bailies and council signed, under the duress of Dudley’s two gunships. In December Thomas Wyndham brought two more ships and burned Balmerino Abbey on Christmas Day. On 12 January 1548 one hundred matchlock guns were delivered from Berwick, with powder flasks, matches, touch boxes, and bullet moulds. Sir Thomas Palmer and Rossetti, who was made master of ordnance at Broughty, planned improvements and noted that a nearby hill overlooked the castle. In February one hundred workmen came from Berwick, with falcon guns, cannonballs for demi-culverins, bows, bills, pikes, cresset lights, cables, and anchors. Palmer set to work fortifying the hill, and he also considered a citadel in Dundee that would have required the demolition of the church and the tolbooth. In March Andrew Dudley was still waiting for lead to make a new platform, probably for artillery, on the castle tower.

Scottish attempts to take the place failed more than once. The Earl of Argyll tried on 22 November 1547 and again in January 1548, the second time with one hundred and fifty men led by Duncan Dundas, who had commanded the workmen of the Scottish artillery train before Pinkie. Another account says that in November 1547 James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, besieged the castle with three thousand men and knocked down part of the tower without capturing it. Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, is also said to have advanced on Dundee in January 1548 to capture Broughty, and to have been deterred by English negotiators, even while he denied rumours that he favoured England and had been bought off. In June 1548 Lord Methven took the guns of the Scottish counter-battery away for the siege of Haddington, which gave the English garrison some relief.

Andrew Dudley was succeeded by John Luttrell, who had been commander at Inchcolm. John Luttrell (soldier) was born about 1518 or 1519 and died on 10 July 1551. He was feudal baron of Dunster in Somerset and held Dunster Castle. He was the eldest son of Sir Andrew Luttrell of Dunster and of Margaret, daughter of Sir Thomas Wyndham. He married Mary, daughter of Sir Griffith Ryce and Katherine Edgcumbe, and they had three daughters, Catherine, Dorothy, and Mary. As a boy, with a younger brother and his uncle Thomas Wyndham, he served as a page in Cardinal Wolsey’s household during the embassy to France in July 1527. He accompanied Edward Seymour in the first Scottish expeditions of the Rough Wooing, was present at the taking of Edinburgh and Leith, and was knighted by Hertford at Leith on 11 May 1544, immediately after Edinburgh was captured and burned. In 1546 he went with Hertford to Boulogne and commanded one hundred men through five months of raids, skirmishes, and ambushes against the French. In September 1547 he led the vanguard of three hundred men at Pinkie.

After Pinkie, John Luttrell (soldier) was captain of the English base at the island abbey of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, from which he harassed Scottish shipping with little success. His uncle Thomas Wyndham visited in December with two warships. On 28 December 1547 Luttrell raided Burntisland, burned ships and buildings at the pier, and received the surrender of Rossend Castle. Inchcolm was then abandoned, and in March 1548 he was sent north to captain Broughty, which dominated the Tay and Dundee. On 11 May 1548 Grey of Wilton, the English commander at Haddington, wrote that Luttrell could not expect more supplies because a French fleet was expected. In June Grey warned him against Scottish assassins, and Somerset required him to dismiss the German mercenaries in his command. Luttrell had also been ordered to build a new fortification on an adjacent site. In November he wrote to Somerset that the turf ramparts were unstable and could not be strengthened, and that his enemies would not need guns, for they would find the work fallen down ready to their hands. In August 1548 he was troubled by rumours that he had mismanaged royal funds. He answered that though he was not so rich as others, nor so profitably and easily employed, it would not appear that he esteemed any of the king’s money above the duty of a humble true subject. One of his brothers was killed in Dundee in November 1548. His letter of defiance to James Doig of Dunrobin, also written James Dog, who was besieging him that November, was captured with other correspondence and survives.

In December 1548 Patrick, Lord Gray, was summoned to account for treasons against the Scottish government. The French commanders argued for his execution. He was pardoned at the command of James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran. In February 1549 Pedro de Negro and his band of Spanish soldiers joined Luttrell at Broughty. In July Luttrell complained that the Spaniards had not yet received pay or clothing. In March 1549 he was one of two English commissioners sent to treat with the earls of Argyll, Atholl, and Errol and others, with a view to expelling the French from Scotland and marrying Edward to Mary. The negotiation came to nothing. In November 1549 the activities of Thomas Wyndham and his nephew Luttrell on the Forth were questioned, and the Earl of Rutland was told to investigate whether a ship they had seized was a lawful prize.

The wider French effort had already shifted. When Ferniehirst Castle was recovered from the English in February 1549, Henri Cleutin was one of the first at the walls, and he then settled a heated argument about the army’s next step. Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon wanted a fortification at Roxburgh before the army moved on. The commanders voted without a clear result, and Cleutin appealed to Arran, who agreed with Villegaignon. In June 1549 Paul de Thermes was sent to Scotland with massive reinforcements, munitions, and money, and with instructions to continue the fortification of border strongholds. Paul de Thermes, also Paul de La Barthe de Thermes, de Termes, or Maréchal de Thermes, was born in 1482 and died in 1562. He began an artillery fort at Luffness near Aberlady to stop English supplies reaching Haddington. James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, stayed at Carberry Tower and Seton Palace to see the works start. A Scottish pursuivant, Alexander Ross, helped at the site, and Gilbert Kennedy, 3rd Earl of Cassilis, was lieutenant of the Scottish force. On 23 June there was a scare that English soldiers would overrun the building site, and men were summoned from as far as Perth and Strathearn. On 25 June the lairds of East and West Lothian were asked for workmen. On 4 July another proclamation answered a scare that the English had entered Scotland to supply Haddington and destroy the new fort. In July Arran was said to have threatened the laird of Beele near Dunbar to make him send his villagers to the work. In August four cannons were brought from Inveresk to Luffness.

An English officer, Thomas Holcroft, wrote to Somerset that they should burn Peebles to welcome Paul de Thermes. Holcroft reported that de Thermes had visited Stirling to advise on its defences, that he was camped at Longniddry and Aberlady, and that he had visited Dunbar, where his escort skirmished with English cavalry and the laird of Scoughall was shot. De Thermes planned troops at Elphinstone, written Elveston in one account, and at Ormiston near English-held Haddington, and at Dunbar, Luffness, and Musselburgh. The English then abandoned Haddington, and Paul de Thermes and Arran walked in. Mary of Guise wrote that the English had left nothing behind but the plague. On the recommendation of Mary of Guise, dated 30 September 1549, Paul de Thermes was made a knight of the Order of Saint Michael for his service in Scotland. After he left Scotland, Henri Cleutin became Henry II’s lieutenant-general there.

On Christmas Day 1549 Mary of Guise held a conference at Stirling, and her guests agreed that more French guns could be brought to besiege Broughty. Robert Hamilton of Briggis directed the labourers, called pioneers, who dug the entrenchments. Twelve English ships arrived to support the defenders. Mary of Guise watched the successful assault on 6 February 1550 from a vantage point across the Tay. Paul de Thermes led the French troops. Two hundred and forty were injured and fifty were killed. The new English fort on Balgillo Hill, eight hundred metres north of the castle, was bombarded and taken. One account says the castle garrison surrendered the following day. Another says the garrison surrendered six days later, at midnight on 12 February 1550. The final English strength at the assault is given as three hundred men and five warships. James Doig of Dunrobin claimed John Luttrell (soldier) as his prisoner, and Luttrell’s papers were captured.

The ransom and the peace overlapped. The Treaty of Boulogne, which ended England’s long war with Scotland and France, is dated both 24 March and, for the day it was declared in England, 29 March 1550. On that declared day Thomas Wyndham was sent to Scotland with two post horses and five Scottish hostages to exchange for Luttrell. On 16 May 1550 the ransom of £1,000 was organised, in one account by Archbishop Hamilton, as an exchange for the sons of George Douglas of Pittendreich and the Master of Semple. George Douglas’s son would later rule Scotland as Regent Morton. Luttrell was promptly arrested again for a debt to a Dundee merchant, Robert Craig. James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, paid the merchant in September. The sum is also given as £19 and 11 shillings. Luttrell was then allowed home. In July 1550 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who had seized the council from Somerset in 1549, rewarded him with a gift of land. He died in an epidemic of the sweating sickness on 10 July 1551, while preparing an expedition to Morocco with his uncle Thomas Wyndham. His three daughters were co-heiresses to one third of his estates. The other two thirds passed, by two entails and by his will, to his next brother, Thomas Luttrell. A brother, Captain Hugh Luttrell, had fought at Boulogne, then deserted and was thought to have tried to betray the town to the French.

An allegorical portrait by Hans Eworth, signed with the monogram HE and dated 1550, shows John Luttrell (soldier) with the goddesses Peace, Venus, and Minerva, and with the Three Graces. It is thought to commemorate his service and the Treaty of Boulogne. He was still a prisoner in Scotland after the treaty until the ransom and the debts were paid in September 1550. The inscription on the rock in the foreground reads that more than the rock amidst the raging seas, the constant heart no danger dreads nor fears, with the initials of Sir John Luttrell, the year 1550, and the painter’s mark. His right bracelet reads Nec Fregit Lucrum 1550, and the left Nec Fingit Discrimen, phrases read as not in cold profit and not to discriminate, and linked to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Dame Frances Yates expounded the picture’s allusions to his service and to sea power in 1967. The original was given to the Courtauld Institute of Art by Lord Lee of Farnham in 1932, in badly damaged condition, and was later conserved. A copy made by George Luttrell in 1591, which hangs at Dunster Castle, supplied much of that research.

After the English left, Broughty briefly housed a French garrison, and then control returned to the Lords Gray. In 1551 Henry Lovell of Ballumbie was accused of seizing the castle and the fishing rights. In 1559 members of the pro-English Protestant faction known as the Congregation occupied Broughty. Their leaders said they had acted as patriots to forestall a French conspiracy to take the castle and threaten Dundee and Perth. Given the Congregation’s own collaboration with an English expedition, that claim may have been convenient. Lord Gray likely had the castle again in the 1560s. The family’s continued Catholicism after the Reformation of 1560 places the house in the story of recusant devotion in Scotland. The original castle may have had a chapel, perhaps, as at Affleck, in an upper chamber of the tower. It is also possible that after the Reformation an impressive social room, such as the entrance corridor or the great hall, was adapted to double as a clandestine chapel, an arrangement known in other recusant castles.

The civil war of the early 1570s pulled the castle back into national politics. In July 1570 it was reported that Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange and James Balfour of Pittendreich, recent defectors to the party of the exiled Mary, had begun to fortify Broughty for the queen and had then abandoned the project. The report is striking because it suggests they had weighed leaving the symbolic strength of Edinburgh Castle for a place more easily supplied by sea. In August the Regent Lennox, head of the pro-English party acting in the name of the infant James VI, assured England that he had taken control. In September 1571 the Regent Mar, Lennox’s successor, expected the two battering pieces from Broughty for the planned siege of Edinburgh. The castle was instead seized by David Seaton, laird of Parbroath, for the party loyal to Mary. Lord Gray resumed control, and in April 1572 he made his peace with the pro-English regency. He remained culturally French in sympathy and openly Catholic, and he also served as an intelligence asset of the English government. In the 1570s control passed firmly to the Lords Gray, who used Broughty as a residence and in the first half of the seventeenth century made it their principal seat.

In 1589 Patrick, Master of Gray, later sixth Lord Gray, was said to be sheltering the fugitive Earl of Bothwell and the Jesuits William Crichton, Robert Hay, and Robert Bruce. In 1594 the Master sold the salmon fishing of Broughty, with two round towers in the palace of Broughty and the vaulted fish house used to prepare and cure the fish, to a Dundee burgess, Robert Flescher, for £2,000 Scots, about £170 sterling. In 1601 Flescher obtained a charter from King James VI confirming that control. A document of that year shows the shore base of the Broughty Ferry fishery inside the castle. As late as the 1820s the vaulted basements of the tower were still used as that shore base. After a troubled residence at Castle Huntly, the Master was forced to return to Broughty with his wife Mary Stewart, a cousin of James VI. He became sixth Lord Gray in 1608 and died in 1612. His widow sold Castle Huntly and went on living at Broughty.

On the night of 31 August 1651, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the royalist garrison abandoned Broughty without a fight. General George Monck’s parliamentary army was closing on Dundee, a royalist stronghold and a rich prize, after a summer’s advance aimed at crushing support for Charles II. On 26 August Monck had called on the governor of Dundee, Robert Lumsden, to surrender. Lumsden refused. The men in Broughty, seeing the strength of the army, quitted and fled. English accounts say they left four cannons, a single barrel of gunpowder, and nineteen barrels of salmon. The salmon are described as provisions, and they were probably from the fishery. The next morning Monck’s troops assaulted Dundee. Much of what is told of the aftermath comes from local tradition. After the walls were breached there were at least three days of slaughter and plunder, and some say as many as a fifth of the people in Dundee were killed. Spoils and prisoners were carried south in English ships, passing Broughty as they went. The Committee of Estates had been captured at Alyth a few days earlier and is said to have been conveyed to England by way of Broughty. It is unclear whether they were lodged in the castle or simply ferried past it to waiting warships. Monck does not seem to have left a permanent garrison during the military government of the 1650s. The siege itself was cursory.

Andrew, seventh Lord Gray, died in 1663. In 1666 Patrick, eighth Lord Gray, struggling with debts, sold Broughty to David Fothringham of Powrie, near Dundee. Another account places the sale after 1666 and the slide into ruin after the Gray family let it go. The Fothringhams had little interest beyond the fishing. During the rising of 1715 the Jacobites took Dundee and appear to have put a garrison into Broughty, which suggests the castle was still in reasonable repair. In January 1716 the Old Pretender, James VIII and III to his supporters, formally appointed the burgh grandee Alexander Wedderburn, also written Wederburn, as governor. In 1787 Robert Burns visited and called it a finely situated ruin jutting into the Tay. In 1801 General Hunter of Burnside began to lay out the new town at the north ferry, the place that became Broughty Ferry. On 21 December 1821 the castle was offered for sale in the Dundee, Perth and Coupar Advertiser as a potentially delightful residence that could be restored at small expense, or as an excellent situation for an inn. There were no takers. In 1822 William Daniell published an aquatint of the view from the water.

In 1846 the Edinburgh and Northern Railway bought the castle in order to build an adjacent harbour for a railway ferry. In 1850 the Dundee and Arbroath Railway bought it and used the vaults for storage. Soon after the Crimean War began, the War Office acquired it so that it could be rearmed against Russian warships. The purchase is dated both 1854 and 1855. The war ended in 1856 before anything substantial was done. The threat of a French invasion in 1860 made the War Office carry the plan through. The castle was gutted and extended to house a sergeant and fourteen men, and a large angled battery was built. The designer was Robert Rowand Anderson, then twenty-six, a civilian with the Corps of Royal Engineers. Broughty was his first known architectural commission. In the same year he designed the memorial to the 78th Highlanders on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. He went on to design the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, to work on the restoration of Jedburgh Abbey and of Saint Bride’s at Douglas, to be knighted in 1902, and to receive the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1916. His working drawings for Broughty do not appear to have survived. The assumption is that his repair of the ruined tower preserved the integrity of the original structure.

The limits of an exposed and cramped site, and Anderson’s determination to reuse the tower and the enclosing wall, produced a hybrid of new military engineering and historical architecture. The 1860 and 1861 works enlarged the tower with a wing at the north-west corner for barracks, and the vaulted ground floor became the magazine. A new artillery fortification to the south and east was a massively thick earthen terreplein faced in stone. Two 68-pounder guns were placed along the west curtain to engage ships in the river. Two 10-inch guns covered the channel, and three more faced the open sea. Another account speaks of emplacements for nine large guns. A guardhouse, later demolished, was built east of the tower to control a new drawbridge through the north curtain, and the wall was loopholed for musketry. The drawbridge still has its lifting mechanism, one of only two surviving in Scotland. The other is at Blackness Castle, also built in the 1860s. A caponier, or gun gallery, projected from the south-east corner of the battery and was reached from the courtyard by a tunnel, so that it could cover the adjacent walls. An enclosure beyond the west curtain, also loopholed, was built to cover the harbour against a land attack. It has been described as the site of demolished buildings, probably including the hospital, though the same ground may mark the supposed site of the twelfth-century hospice for ferry travellers. The new fort was completed in 1861. In December a forty-two-gun salute was fired for the death of Prince Albert. Tradition calls this the only time Broughty’s guns were fired, which is unlikely, because the guns must also have been fired in training.

When the castle was refortified, the ironclad warship was only just entering service. The expected enemy was still a wooden ship of the line, which would have been helpless against the explosive shells of the 10-inch guns. The fast current hindered close attack by armoured floating batteries, and the ramparts gave good cover against shell and round shot. Within a few decades, steam and steel ships and longer-ranged breech-loading guns made the work look obsolete. In December 1887 a joint committee of the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, in a survey of home coastal defence, described Broughty as the only work defending the Tay, an obsolete work crowded with smooth-bore guns, and in its present condition worse than useless. By 1888 Captain J. G. Grant of the Forfarshire Artillery Volunteers could call it badly built, badly designed, and utterly useless for the purpose, and say that a fort such as this could never defend the river, for its demolition would only afford an enemy an hour’s pleasant and agreeable recreation. Amendments followed. Two new gun emplacements with concrete aprons were built along the south curtain, burying the emplacements of 1860 and 1861, and the west enclosure was filled to create more magazines. New guns came and went in the 1890s.

The volunteers had been here since the start. The Forfarshire Artillery Volunteers were raised in 1859. In 1862 a practice battery was set up on Castle Green, to the east of the castle, and Broughty was their headquarters until they moved to Dundee in 1870. After 1870 the castle was used as a military school. In 1882 a shore battery was built at Buddon Ness, on the coast to the east. In 1888 the castle again became a garrison headquarters, this time for the newly formed Tay Division of the Submarine Miners, Royal Engineers, volunteers whose task was to lay mines in the Tay in an emergency. A range to house them is dated both to 1886 and 1887, to the east of the castle, and to 1888, when a new building, still in use, was put up outside the castle as their accommodation. The Forth and the Tay were the last group of home ports to be given mines in this late nineteenth-century phase. Over the following decades mining was abandoned and restored as strategy changed. It is not certain that anti-submarine mines were laid in the Tay in the First World War, though mining was a key part of the defences before that war and was established again in the Second. The submarine-miners’ station is the only Scottish example still standing. The barracks of the Forth at Port Laing and of the Clyde at Fort Matilda have been demolished. Plans in the 1880s for a minefield in the Tay left primer pits on the green, where mines were armed. The pits were carefully built, with thick brick walls and a corrugated-iron roof designed so that, in an accidental explosion, the blast would go upwards.

With Germany replacing France as the chief threat, another battery was installed on Castle Green in 1903 to 1905, armed with long-range guns and provided with two defence electric lights. Both were moveable concentrated beams. The first stood just to the right flank of the battery, and the second two hundred yards to the left flank. Broughty Ferry, a burgh from 1864, was incorporated into the City of Dundee in 1913. At the start of the First World War minor works improved the fort. The castle battery mounted two 4.7-inch quick-firing guns. A horizontal slit was cut into the caponier of 1860 and 1861 so that a Maxim gun could rake the beach to the east, and a position-finding cell was built on top of the main tower. The battery on the green was mobilised in 1915 and remained until the end of the war. The castle was completely disarmed in 1932. The last of its garrison left in 1934. In 1935 it passed from the War Department to the Ministry of Works. The state had already taken an interest in the ancient fabric as early as 1910. In 1939 the castle returned to the War Department, was rearmed, and was garrisoned by 503 Coast Regiment, Royal Artillery. In 1942 a defence post, also called a battery and fire-command post, was built on top of the tower. During the Second World War the place was staffed by British Army and Home Guard units and by the Polish Army. It was in military use until 1932 and again from 1939 to 1949. One account says that by 1956 all the guns and equipment had been removed. In 1945 the castle returned to the Ministry of Works.

In 1949 it was leased to Dundee Corporation and a tea room was opened, the forerunner of the later refreshment room. In 1967 parts of the outer battery were demolished to make way for recreational facilities, including a crazy-golf course. In 1969 Dundee Corporation opened a museum in the tower. A memorial seat was installed that year to the Royal Artillery territorials and volunteers. The state took ownership in 1973. The museum has been run for Dundee City Council, and the displays have been drawn from the council’s permanent collections. Early galleries included a local and whaling history around 1970 and a seashore gallery in 1976. A low-cost update of the military gallery came in 1994, and a capital allocation of £30,000 in 2001 to 2002 was to support redevelopment with lottery and council money. Over the last generation the displays have centred on the life of the area from prehistory to the present, on the landscape and wildlife, on the armoury and the coastal defences and the local volunteers, and on a viewing room over the estuary. Whaling paintings once shown here are now in the McManus Gallery in Dundee. The Orchar collection remains: more than four hundred works gathered by James Guthrie Orchar, born in 1825 and died in 1898, an inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, and provost of Broughty Ferry. The 2025 season marked the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Binoculars can be borrowed from reception for a small deposit, for the watch for Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the Tay. Those dolphins are among the largest of their kind, carrying extra blubber for the cold of the North Sea, and they probably fatten on salmon returning to the river. The castle stands near a bay valued for its intertidal habitat and as a feeding ground for internationally important numbers of wintering waders and ducks. Sea beet and sea plantain, both rare in Scotland, grow around the castle.

The castle was designated a scheduled monument on 30 November 1981. The visible structures are described as a mid-Victorian stronghold built on the site of, and incorporating parts of, the castle of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Below-ground remains of medieval and later fortification are expected, and any significant disturbance of the ground is meant to be watched. Castle Green is of high archaeological interest for an icehouse and for military remains as well as for the castle.

Modern digging has tested that expectation. In 1993 the installation of cables for floodlighting required 103 metres of trench on Castle Green and 31 metres in the courtyard. The trenches were 30 centimetres wide at the surface, narrowed to 15 or 25 centimetres at the bottom, and were 30 to 50 centimetres deep. The green showed extensive made ground and terracing from the refortification of the 1860s and from twentieth-century landscaping. The mound under the nineteenth-century castle is built of quarried sandstone, and some revetting of the bedrock was seen. East of the ramp, the remains of a rubble-filled bunker were found on the site of the dynamo and engine rooms. A corner of the foundations or the roof of another bunker was seen at the north end of the ramp, and a gravel path crosses the eastern green from north to south. Inside the courtyard the foundations of a nineteenth-century guardhouse were revealed, together with a wall about two metres thick running from north-east to south-west. That wall may be the remains of a mid-sixteenth-century angled tower known to have stood in the area. Most of the courtyard deposits were make-up for the battery, and they showed that the yard had been resurfaced many times. The work was sponsored by Tayside Enterprise.

In January 2003 a small trench immediately north of the castle, east of the approach road, investigated a sudden subsidence. A large pit cut into loose gravel had been inadequately backfilled. It was thought most likely to mark the extraction of a single large post, possibly a flagpole. In 2008 a geophysical survey of subsidence on the green, following study of the maps, indicated building remains across the site, including areas of clearance, robbed wall, and foundations still in place. The green had been the site of a number of military buildings. A hole then opened in the grass. It was described as about 30 centimetres across, and as roughly a foot long. Three primer pits lay underneath, and the subsidence sat directly over one of them. The pit itself was likely more than a metre deep. Archaeologists stripped the turf from an area of about five metres by five. The dig began on Tuesday 3 February 2009 and was expected to last about a week. It was led by David Murray, with Kirkdale Archaeology, and it uncovered what appeared to be the primer pits marked on early maps. Kirsty Owen, a cultural resources adviser for central Scotland, said that it was not every day one got to look at later military remains, that their archaeology was often neglected, and that the dig could add a little to the history of the castle. Minor excavations confirmed the pits.

In 1989 three rare Armstrong guns of the 1860s were found on Broughty Ferry pier, where they had been used as bollards. They were reclaimed, conserved, and put on display in the castle grounds.

The museum’s recent years have been a fight to stay open. In February 2024 the castle was named, with Mills Observatory and the golf course at Caird Park, among sites that might close under proposed budget cuts by Dundee City Council. Public concern led to the proposals being reconsidered later that month after money was allocated to keep the facilities running. In May 2024 a public consultation asked about the long-term future of the three venues, and a petition against closure gathered thousands of signatures. In November 2024 council officers recommended that Mills Observatory stay open because visitor numbers had risen, that the golf course close in April 2025, and that Broughty Castle close in October 2025. On 2 December 2024 councillors deferred a final decision and gave the castle a stay, with the question to be revisited no later than February 2025. The trust operating the museum for the council said it would support the immediate future in partnership with the Broughty Ferry traders, and a February 2025 report proposed that the lease remain in place.

A community campaign, Save the Castle, was launched in July 2025 by Friends of Broughty Castle. Around the same time a fundraiser and a funding package of £50,000 from Dundee City Council let the castle stay open into late 2025, with some hours reduced. In September 2025 the actor Brian Cox, who was born in Dundee, urged the council not to let the castle become a mausoleum. The closure, the operator said, would have saved £80,000 a year. The campaign also drew the support of Lorraine Kelly. Friends of Broughty Castle, also called Friends of Broughty Ferry Castle, grew out of the traders’ association. The group later received charitable status and shifted from campaigning to recruiting members, a chair, a treasurer, a membership secretary, and a general committee, with the aim of raising money for the galleries and for events.

In March 2026 a joint investment was announced to secure the museum for three years. One account puts the sum at £150,000 from Dundee City Council and the Northwood Charitable Trust together, with the council also continuing to pay essential maintenance, the money to support exhibitions and the seasonal programme from April to October. Another account says the council administration committed £100,000 over the next two financial years so that the castle could remain open for three years on summer hours, while a sustainable longer-term model was sought. Council leader Mark Flynn and Blair Thomson of the Northwood Charitable Trust visited Anna Day, head of culture and libraries for the operating trust, to mark the announcement. Flynn said residents, families, and visitors would be able to keep enjoying the stories, exhibitions, and views while talks on the long term continued. Thomson said the partnership gave certainty and strengthened the castle’s role as a cultural anchor for Broughty Ferry. The state body that cares for the fabric welcomed a solution that would let the museum keep operating in the castle. The 2025 season drew 28,748 visitors, set against 28,900 in 2024 to 2025, even with a reduced weekly opening. An earlier count, for 2017, was 45,166. Highlights of 2025 included approval of a sauna in the grounds, markets in July, August, and October, and the Orchar anniversary. Further market dates were already booked for 2026.

The operator’s published hours, after the 2026 season, close the museum for the winter and reopen it on 1 April 2027. From April to 25 October it is closed on Monday and Tuesday, open from 10:00 to 16:00 on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and open from 12:30 to 16:00 on Sunday. Last entry is fifteen minutes before closing. From 26 October to March it is closed. On Sunday 25 October 2026, which would have been the last day of that season, extreme weather closed the building. Entry to the museum and the grounds is free. Dogs are not allowed in the grounds or the building, except guide dogs. Access for people with limited mobility is highly restricted by the fortified building. Visitor toilets are on the second floor. A small shop sells gifts and postcards on that floor. A listing for a partial eclipse viewing on Wednesday 12 August set the start at 6:07 in the evening and the peak at 7:04, with the grounds to remain open until 8:30 and eclipse glasses on sale for £1 a pair while stocks lasted. The castle’s position was preferred to that of Mills Observatory because of where the sun would stand.

The views from the tower, and from the wartime post on its roof, run west to the Tay bridges and Dundee Law, south across the estuary to the north Fife coast and the sands of Tentsmuir Point, and east to the lighthouse at Buddon Ness and the open North Sea. From the east beach the castle reads as a sea fortress. From the water it throws a reflection that Daniell chose in 1822. Castle Green is the open ground to the north, once the practice battery, the submarine-miners’ working area, and the later gun battery, and now a public green beside the harbour and the beach. The underground magazines are opened only on special days, such as Doors Open Day. The place is one of the few intact buildings in public hands that still matches the familiar image of a Scottish castle, a tall tower over a lower courtyard, even though the outline is the Victorian restoration of a medieval artillery tower. It has been used as a background landmark in the series Bob Servant, and drone footage of it appears in the 2022 film The River, a year in the life of the Tay. What remains unresolved is what stood on the rock before the fifteenth century, how much of the tower is Angus work and how much is Gray work, how far the medieval house was a residence rather than a fort, and what Anderson’s missing drawings would show of the old internal arrangement. Further survey of the green and of the submarine-mining buildings could still recover phases that the documents only sketch.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/broughty-castle